Using SmartNotebook Software

If you have a SMART Board in your school, you should be able to download the SMART Notebook software to all your school computers. This software offers some really neat opportunities for students to create a variety of products. It is a very versatile tool for integrating technology in the classroom. Our middle school students routinely use the software to create review games in Science and Spanish classes. With the linking feature, it is possible to make Jeopardy games and board games.

As I mentioned in a prior post, our first graders created their own Gingerbread Man stories with it. In another post, I discussed how they created new endings to a comic book. This year, they will take that a step further to create comic strips. When the SMART Notebook file is printed out horizontally in handout form it looks just like a comic strip. 

Since the SMART Notebook file can be exported as a JPEGs, students can use the tool bar to help explain math problems, language arts concepts and science theories, export the page and post them to their blog. Here is a great math challenge file for first graders. We talked about all the different tools that students can use in this software to help them solve the problems, then gave each student their own copy of the file to work on independently.